


The Not-So-Sordid Tale of King Reginald the Unfortunate

by Dustbunnygirl



Series: Tales of the Bard - Reggie's Story [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-01
Updated: 2007-07-01
Packaged: 2018-08-14 09:41:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8008519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dustbunnygirl/pseuds/Dustbunnygirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, I created characters for this urban fantasy novel series that has since been scrapped (the 'verse was rewritten, the characters as written were left behind, and the plot was pretty much imploded).  And these two specific characters kind of took on a life of their own outside the trilogy.  This entirely ridiculous story kind of sets the stage for how one of them finds himself in the state he is by the time of the book, so it makes a perfect place to start out this little series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Not-So-Sordid Tale of King Reginald the Unfortunate

Magic, like nature, has a sense of humor. Exactly which possesses the crueler wit has been the topic of furious debate for centuries. The Eight Days’ War, that bloody engagement fought between the Upper Westians and the Lower Westians (not to be confused with the High Westians and Not-Quite-So-High Westians, as a point of clarification), carried on over just this very topic. That it carried on about it for exactly 734 days and not eight just goes to show you history is subjective and mostly made up by silly old men with nothing better to do with their time than come up with catchy names for wars.

And really, isn’t The Eight Days’ War so much catchier than The 734 Days’ War? Rolls off the tongue so much simpler.

Which isn’t the point.

The point is, of course, that it has been a bone of contention for eons as to which has the crueler sense humor: magic or nature. General consensus was reached among many a high-ranking magically-inclined academic (and generally dismissed by many high-ranking magically-disinclined ones) that the true answer had to be nature. It should be noted, however, that they probably possess a slight and easily identifiable bias, even if they did P.S. the aforementioned consensus with “No, really, we’re totally objective here. Our mothers will vouch for us.”

Spearheading the objectivity campaign was a Professor Bertregard Mitslip, Assistant Dean of Spurious and Controversial Comments at Edibaugh Vocational Institute of Mid-Wizardry. According to the Professor, the answer to the age-old debate could be found in one simple organism.

“All the proof you need,” he said, “exists in the curious creature known as the duckbilled platypus.”

(Yes, Arcadie has platypi. No, they can’t explain them either.)

“The platypus,” Professor Mitslip’s argument goes, “is a distinctly odd and clumsily designed creature. Its snout’s too big, too flat, and really rather odd looking. And what’s with the egg laying? What’s it think it is, a chicken?

“Nothing in magic is as ridiculous or senseless as all that,” he concludes, “and we’re responsible for gryphons, so that’s really saying something.”

When charged to counter this cast iron argument, a student in one of the Professor’s classes stood up, and in perfect imitation of his learned mentor clutched a lapel of his robe in each hand. With steady eyes and even voice, he addressed the classroom as if it were a tribunal. “No doubt it’s a strong argument,” the young man said as he stared into the self-assured face at the front of the classroom, its owner so unconcerned with what was to come that he was off-handedly making himself a hot cuppa. “But what do you make of the story of King Reginald then?”

Shocked, the Professor did the only thing he could think of; fainted straight away into his cup of herbal tea.

 

On the whole, barring that one remarkable and unfortunate event that serves as the source of “the Mitslip Counter”, there was nothing the least bit memorable about King Reginald. He ruled over a small, plain stretch of land wedged clumsily between two craggy mountains – the Ela and the Ola, named for mythical witch-goddesses the natives said inhabited them - known as The Rupstein Corridor. The two mountains, large, dark, and horrifically malformed as they were, left the corridor in shadow for twenty-three and a half hours every day. The thirty minutes of sun happened from precisely 12:45 to 1:15 each and every day, barring rain, snow, or solar eclipse.

It should be mentioned that the region suffered from an unnaturally rainy and snowy climate, and for some reason seemed prone to spontaneous eclipses. So it was a bit dark, you might say.

The people of the Corridor were a pale, gangly sort who made their living mostly selling umbrellas, snow shoes, and lanterns amongst each other. They weren’t too handy at raising corn, wheat, or tomatoes, but they had a thriving mushroom export business that kept them deeply in the black. It was also a very crowded community; they didn’t have cable t.v., you see, and when mommies and daddies get very bored at night – especially night that seems to stretch on all day with only thirty minutes of reprieve on a once in awhile basis – there’s little for them to do but make little baby Rupsteins. The average Rupsteinian family consisted of two typically exhausted parents and eight to twelve utterly dull children. 

But that’s probably more than anyone ever needs to know about Rupsteinian reproduction.

Really, the only reason there was a kingdom there at all was because King Reginald’s great-great-great-grand uncle Ernst claimed it as his during a moment of drunken wandering during the final hours of the aforementioned and misnamed Eight Days’ War and no one found it worthwhile enough to challenge him for it. Five generations past his mead-inspired endeavor, it still wasn’t worthwhile, even given the lucrative mushroom business. So undesired was it that Ernst’s rightful heir, his great-great-great grandson Mort couldn’t even be bothered to run it. He went off in search of fame, fortune, and a well-proportioned trophy wife and left the castle and crown to his unfortunate cousin, Reginald. Mort left explicit instructions for Reginald in his wake as well: If the whole place should catch fire and somehow manage to fall in the (very distant) sea, consider it a good omen and don’t send word. His insurance company would contact him, should the estate be worth anything at all (which was doubtful).

Reginald had been someone’s unfortunate something or other since the day he was born, backwards and upside down to boot. His mother used to tell the other little boys at Barbamelle’s Academy of Future Important People that the reason his nose was a smidge off center and a pinch flat was due to a harrowing dragon-slaying incident when he was a toddler. Truly, it was the result of an unfortunate birthing that involved his face spending an inordinate amount of time pressed against the bedding while his mother’s nearsighted midwife spanked the back of his head to make his back end cry. His life was filled with similar preposterous circumstances, all of which earned him the unimaginative but quite accurate nickname of Reginald the Unfortunate. 

He thought his luck was looking up, though, when he got the carrier pigeon message from Mort inviting him to come claim the kingship in “quaint and peaceful Rupstein.” His mother, who’d long come to the conclusion her son was doomed to something ordinary and dull, like accounting, was predictably thrilled to learn of the news. 

“This is your chance to shine, Reggie,” she told him as she smoothed the collar of his traveling cloak. “Your chance to show all those silly people who said you’d never amount to anything interesting at all.”

“What people were those?” he asked, quite shocked in point of fact. Unfortunate, surely; it was his nickname after all. But uninteresting as well? That was certainly news.

“Your father and I mostly,” she said, before adding, quickly, “but nevermind that now. You should be on your way, if you want to arrive in time for your own coronation.”

“They can’t really have it without me, can they?”

His mother thought about the question for a moment, then she shook her head and shoved him toward his horse. “No time for silly questions! You have a kingdom to run, so get on with it!”

Reginald, not being particularly argumentative as well as, apparently, not particularly interesting, climbed upon his mostly trusty steed and took off at a mediocre gallop, waving a final farewell to his mother, his home, and all the trappings of his short but unfortunate life.

Three days later, he arrived at Rupstein with three minutes of quasi-daily sunshine remaining. It wasn’t raining, something the town wise men clung to as a very good sign as they helped their new king from his horse and led him to the keep. 

“It’s never a good sign, rain on a coronation day,” the eldest of the wise men said as he took Reginald by the arm. “It’s a portent of ill things to come. Assassination, plague, famine, embezzlement. It even portended the amputation of King Lordimere’s left foot.”

“How did he lose his left foot?” Reginald asked in his typical curiosity. 

“Was a rather unfortunate game of Tiddlywinks, I’m afraid.” 

“Huh.” While the five percent of his brain prone to doing so pondered how, exactly, someone manages to amputate a limb playing Tiddlywinks, the other five percent prodded him to ask: “King’s crowned on a sunny coronation have better luck, then?”

“Not really,” the wise men said in unison. When Reginald opened his mouth to ask for further clarification, they shrugged. Somehow, the young almost-King translated that as “Don’t ask,” and, so, didn’t. He doubted it mattered one way or another, really, since the sun was behind the second mountain long before the coronation ceremony even got started, making it all somehow a little moot.

It happened that, three weeks into his reign as king, Reginald decided to take a solitary ride through the kingdom’s outer reaches. He rose before dawn, saddled his mostly trusty steed himself, packed his umbrella and his newest set of snowshoes just in case, and took off at a noisy trot down the cobblestoned thoroughfare leading away from the castle, oblivious to the commotion he made while departing. Though the guards were of course wakened by the clamor, they mostly ignored it out of pique: It was generally known that the guards of the kingdom highly prized their beauty sleep and were quite put out to have it interrupted. 

The king rode and rode and rode, past sleeping umbrella merchants and snowshoe artisans. He waved to the yawning mushroom farmers heading down to harvest the day’s crop and passed rows and rows and rows of little schoolhouses built to accommodate the ever-growing population of children. (Rupstein’s second biggest import, falling a short second to umbrellas, was school teachers). He rode to the outer reaches of his kingdom – a mere four miles, give or take, since the kingdom wasn’t all that impressive, size-wise, anyway – and stopped when he saw a faint and welcoming light up ahead. He nudged the horse into a faster gallop, drawn by the eerie glow, until he came to a small fountain, seemingly carved out of the side of the Ola’s craggy face. 

It was, altogether, a strange and beautiful thing, though it perplexed Reginald greatly. The water wound down from a source higher up the mountain’s façade, as clear as any other trickle ever seen in a million other places. If he reached out his hand and stopped the flow before it entered the cauldron it looked, smelled, and tasted like all other water the rest of the world over. But the moment it touched the surface of the fountain’s contents, it became infused with an odd blue light. And it wasn’t simply that the fountain was somehow lit from below; if he removed water from the fountain, it glowed still.

“Curious,” he said, and wondered to himself why he hadn’t heard of the water before. As he was thirsty from his long journey and had, ironically enough, forgotten to pack any water or wine, he pulled a cup – as he’d remembered to pack one of those – from his bag and dipped it into the strangely luminescent pool. 

“Wouldn’t do that!” came a voice from behind him, shrill and sharp. The sound so surprised him he almost dropped the cup, but managed somehow to keep it mostly steady and partially full. “Won’t like what happens, if y’do!”

When Reginald turned, he spotted a gnarly-limbed creature, barely tall enough to reach his royal thigh. It had long, gray hair – not grayed by age, he guessed, but by whatever inherent dullness made the rest of the valley dank and colorless – and similarly colored eyes. Its skin was a pallid blue and covered from shoulders to knees completely, baring its bared arms, in a grubby white shift. Reginald assumed, by the slight fullness of its lips and the two rounded protrusions on its chest, that it was probably female.

“A drink of water never hurt anyone,” the king said with every ounce of his royal authority, “and as King, I lay claim to every pebble, every blade of grass, and every droplet of moisture from one end of this valley to the other.”

“Figurin’ the mountain queen mightn’t not think so much like y’do,” the creature said, stepping forward. As it walked, Reginald noted that its knees bent backwards; so did its elbows. “Figurin’ she might think she owns i’tall.”

“Well, she’d be thinking wrong, wouldn’t she? I’ve got the crown, see, and a letter from cousin Mort telling me this is all mine. He didn’t make any mention of any queen or any joint ownership of anything whatsoever.” Reginald nodded sharply, regally. Meanwhile, his hand shook around his cup as he continued to raise it, though somewhat less assertively than before. “Unless you’ve got proof of some sort of a prior claim or an agreement with my great-great-great Uncle Ernst then you really don’t have a legal leg to stand on.”

“Not gonna like it,” the creature cooed in a distorted sing-songy tone. It came to a stop a few feet from Reginald and reclined back on its oddly-bent knees in a sort of backward crouch. 

“Pish,” said the king, before he tipped the cup to his lips and drank deeply of his glowing blue cup.

It should be said that, if the light had been better and Reginald had been inclined to notice, he would’ve seen a simple warning carved into the outer wall of the fountain in clear, grammatically correct Rupstenian. Simply enough, it said, “Warning: All who drink from the fountain of Ola will be very, very sorry.” It should also be noted that, despite King Ernst’s stringent denial that magic existed in any way in his presence - since he firmly disbelieved in such things - and thus his kingdom, the mountains truly were inhabited by a pair of witch-goddesses who mostly slept the last millennia or so, as long as the pesky humans that wandered between them didn’t disturb them in any way.

Such as do something silly, like drink from Ola’s sacred fountain.

Reginald began to feel odd as soon as the water passed his lips. He clutched his throat in desperation and turned wide, panicked eyes on the oddly-hunched creature. In its place stood a beautiful woman of about the same height, with flowing crimson hair and a shaking finger that instantly reminded Reginald of his mother. Though he was ignorant of this fact, he was being thoroughly scolded by Witch-Goddess Ola herself, in the flesh.

“I told you not to do that,” she said with a stomp of her foot. “Some day, you stupid little mortals are going to learn how to listen.”

“Whuh…happ…me?” he asked through a tightly clenched throat.

“Just a little transfiguration. Don’t worry, it only hurts for a minute.” She sighed, glancing at the intricate sundial on her wrist. It was too bad, really, that Reginald’s throat was so tight and strange; he would’ve loved to ask how a sundial works in a place with only thirty minutes of sun a day. “Right, so, you're going to change, you’ll be stuck that way forever, and I'll go on about my business. That work for you?” 

Reggie gasped and choked and fought to squeak out a no, but he noticed the only sounds he could make anymore were a strangled sort of chirpy noise. Also, though he hadn’t noticed until just that moment, he was getting considerably shorter.

“Keen. I’ve got a nap to get back to.” Ola snapped her fingers twice and disappeared in a swirl of brilliant light. A moment later, a strange, disembodied voice caught the wind and scolded him from places unknown. “It really is rude to interrupt a good nap, you know. We goddesses need our beauty sleep.” By the time the voice had faded, the transformation was complete.

There are, it should be said, certain guidelines in place about the magical transfiguration of mortal beings as punishment for divine slights. They're detailed thoroughly in Protocols for Mortal/Divine Interaction, Chapter 5, sub-sections 4a and 7b. Section 4 deals primarily with the circumstances which merit corporal transfiguration. They're quite flexible merits, it should be said, leaving room for a variety of major and minor slights. A revision made in 1272 removed the most minor of these trespasses – what has been called the "That Mortal Gave Me a Hangnail" clause – but upheld a ruling that allowed gods to use it as punishment for leaving offerings that cause a god heart burn. But it's section 7 that specified the what's. Amphibians, for one reason or another, are considered the standard, with frogs or toads being the most popular among the species. It was an entirely arbitrary decision, based on one wizard's contention that one was more likely to wander upon a frog or toad than a wombat or an emu. 

And, really, he had a point. Because all divine transfigurations, no matter what crime they were being used for, share the same escape clause – the curse can be lifted if the cursee can gain a kiss from a princess – or some other similar young woman of pure heart. (Note that it indicates a pure heart; no one was foolish enough to assume a young woman of any average beauty had any chance of remaining pure of anything else for long). To gain that kiss, you had to have some chance of being kissed, and word had gotten out by then about perfectly acceptable princes hiding about on lily pads waiting for an opportune smooch. 

Very few princesses were on the lookout for enchanted ferrets waiting for a snog. And that's what Reginald found himself as when the abracadabra faded and he was left to crawl out of his pile of discarded clothing alone: a full-grown, tan and silver ferret that desperately needed to find himself a princess.

Given the King's nickname, it's no surprise that, four hundred years later, he's still looking, is it? And that's far, far crueler than simply giving a mammal webbed feet and an egg pouch, I don't care who you are.


End file.
